The SECI Model
According to the well known SECI model[1], knowledge creation is a continuous and dynamic interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge. This interaction is shaped by shifts between different modes of knowledge conversion involving actors and services in a facility or livelihood.
It starts from "Socialization," when the actors are interacting and use services, gaining experience.
During "Externalisation" or articulation, the knowledge is made explicit, for example in drawings, models, their evaluations, etc.
This is followed by the "Combination" step during which explicit knowledge is converted into more complex sets of explicit knowledge, for example in plans, reports, work instructions.
The "Internalization" converts the actors’ explicit knowledge into the actors’ tacit knowledge. Then the process starts again with socialization and so on.
Thus the knowledge creation happens continuously as part of a cognitive self-transformation. It also happens in multiple concurrently operating teams or groups. The figure below represents both the operations of the actors involving the facility or livelihood (Arrow A) and the self-transformation (B) in which the team or group abandons obsolete knowledge and learns to create new things, improves its activities and deploys new tools and services (Arrow A’). The circular B arrow applies the SECI modes of knowledge conversion.
Source: Ontological Commitment for Participative Simulation (Goossenaerts and Pelletier, 2002)
Knowledge-based Intervention in Systems
The Presumptive Mindset
A Scientist may be tempted to recommend an intervention in a system, on the basis of "scientific knowledge1" on one or a few factors at play in the system.
In collective action (and reflection) systems, the conditionality of collective-action theoretical predictions necessitates a careful analysis of the socio-technical system of interest, as a problem-situation is articulated, a hypothetical solution is invented or found, the evidence of the intervention is constructed, and the intervention is implemented in practice.
In multi-level socio-technical systems, an intervention might consist of multiple components influencing outcomes via various underlying mechanisms. Such complex interventions receive little interest from scientists.
The temptations of the presumptive mindset can be prevented by giving proper attention to diagnostics prior to the therapeutics.
Diagnostics before Prescription
The conversion of (development economics) knowledge at the macro level has only been partially successful. Rodrik [2] elaborates this point by listing past and ongoing initiatives and successes and the ideas that have been motivating them.
Therapeutic options will often involve an innovation for the benefiting socio-technical system.
Such innovations can be of different types: incremental, architectural, modular or radical.
This is explained in the following chapter which also introduces the term dominant design.
Architecture and Innovation Types
Some of the externalized knowledge is architectural knowledge.
Is there a way of separating externalized architectural knowledge from situational knowledge on components with their sizes, and interactions with their rates and performances?
Focussing on organizational-strategy aspects of innovation, Ettlie et al. (1984) [3] gave an early summary of the dichotomy between radical and incremental innovation. They focus on the organizational strategy and structural aspects of the introduction and adoption of innovation and ask questions such as: “Does the innovation incorporate technology that is risky, or a departure from existing practice? Is it new to the adopting unit and to the referent group of organizations? Does it require change to both throughput (process) and output (production and service)? What is the magnitude or cost of change?”
A more prominent role to the knowledge-externalization aspect of innovation is given in the framework of Henderson and Clark (1990)[4]. The framework distinguishes four types of innovation:
- Incremental: an established design is reinforced by improving individual components.
- Architectural: the way in which the components of an artefact are linked together changes, while leaving untouched the core design concepts and the basic knowledge underlying the components.
- Modular: only the core design concepts of a technology are changed, not the linkages.
- Radical: a new dominant design is established with a new set of core design concepts embodied in components that are linked together in a new architecture.
A dominant design is externalized architectural knowledge, in the knowledge conversion process, its articulation ends a period of experimentation and confusion. A dominant design is characterized by a set of core design concepts that correspond to the major functions performed by an artefact, as embodied in components, and by an architecture that defines the ways in which these components are integrated (interact). It incorporates a range of basic choices that are not revisited in every subsequent design. Once a dominant design has emerged, new component knowledge becomes more valuable to the firms than new architectural knowledge, which appears relatively stable.
Each type of innovation has implications for the knowledge conversion practises, and for the division of industries and externalized knowledge that is key to progress.
Diagnostics and Therapeutics in the Multi-level Ba
Nonaka & Konno [5] describe the Japanese word Ba as the world where the individual realizes himself as part of the environment on which his life depends. These authors illustrate the Ba concept in reference to the SECI model, there is a different type of Ba for each knowledge conversion mode, and they illustrate Ba's transformation in companies.
Bringing in also the macro, meso, micro and pico classification (in the social architecture), Ba's transformation in companies is transformation of the "micro ba."
In multi-level socio-technical systems, also transformations of the sectoral environment, the "meso ba," and of the overall landscape, the "macro ba," are feasible.
Anatomy of Complex Interventions and Change
Adopting a macro-meso-micro-pico dominant design of the socio-technical system, with level specific mechanisms and constraints, then:
- each level can host incremental, architectural, modular and radical innovations;
- each level offers specific degrees of freedoms and boundary conditions;
- entrenched practice patterns (hampering change) are often diagnosed as exogenous binding factors for one actor (pico or micro level) that appear to be choice factors for another actor (meso or macro level).
Proven pertinent to enterprise architecture induced by information systems [6], the types of innovation allow us to distinguish intervention options of each of the actors in their socio-technical interactions.
Mono- or cross-level occurrence of these innovation types further differentiates architectural and radical types of innovation. In mono-level architectural innovation the changes in the linkages among components (and principals owning or exchanging them) would happen within a single level, for instance by drawing up a new supply chain structure for a given product platform, or by defining a new auctioning or regulatory mechanism.
The emergence of a radically new socio-technical regime within a given landscape illustrates mono-level radical innovation. An example is the British transition from sailing ships to steamships (1840-1920) [7].
If a transition includes the creation of new entities at another level that interact according to patterns known from other socio-technical regimes, then we could refer to it as a cross-level architectural innovation. In cross-level radical innovation, new types of cross-level interactions would coincide with radical innovation at more than one level.
Leveraging an Extended Socio-technical Design Space
By considering multiple actors at multiple levels, an extended, yet disciplined, socio-technical design space is exposed where interfaces facilitate impact projections, as exogenous factors for one actor appear to be choice factors for another actor.
By exposing such relationships, the collective regulative bundle (CRB) methodogy inherits and reinforces the benefit of Institution Analysis and Design (IAD) that it can lead one out of the path dependency of existing patterns of practice when their accompanying ways of thinking have not yielded solutions (Oakerson (1978)[8] cited by [9]).
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There is a reference to this page in the discussion The print publishing industry is rapidly declining. What high-level enterprise architectural suggestion does the community have for them? (LinkedIn Enterprise Architecture Network group).
Surviving Disruption in Harvard Business Review of December 2012, by Maxwell Wessel and Clayton M. Christensen.
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